Recently has been voted the end of net neutrality in the US if I am not mistaken?

I was wondering if some of you who live there (John, Josiah..) have noticed some changes since then? Maybe it's too early.

I'm asking this because I have received an email from Vimeo. I really love this social network for videos, I find it of much better quality then Youtube and imo more opened to Art. However it would seem that they are now downgrading the accounts of the users who have the free Basic option:

Vimeo wrote:Dear Simon Mesnard,

Supporting our community of creators is, and has always been, our top priority. As we invest in more tools to help our creators — and continue to be an ad-free service that relies on member support instead of ad revenue — we have to adjust what we offer for free (like storage, which, between transcoding and hosting, is pretty expensive).

This is to let you know that starting January 29, we’re introducing a 5GB total storage limit for Basic members.

You’re currently 1.46GB over the limit. You won’t lose any of your current videos, but you won’t be able to upload more videos until you either upgrade your membership or free up some space on your account.

For me it follows directly the end of Net Neutrality, as only the people with money will soon be able to use such great services, more and more. In a few years, most (if not all) free accounts everywhere will be crap, and small unknown creators will have more and more troubles to share their work and show their content...

Well maybe I'm wrong and that their decision has nothing to do with Net Neutrality, maybe it's just Vimeo becoming greedy, but still I'd be happy to read your opinion!

I must say that I have paid for the Premium account for 3 years, it was quite expensive imo, so I'm really disapointed if I have less space to upload my videos in the future.

So Net Neutrality is a bit confusing. I still don't 100% understand it, but what is happening with Vimeo isn't because of the repeal of Net Neutrality that's just their own changes as a company.

What Net Neutrality did was allowed anyone in the country to have access to the internet no matter the content or website. With it being repealed now if you want certain websites to load faster, or you want certain content you will have to pay more for those things to load on your computer. Lets say you use Youtube, Facebook, and certain message boards, but your basic internet only gives you access to Facebook and Youtube, then you will have to pay more just to be able to load the message boards.

Again I still don't full understand it, but I think that's the basic idea of it.

Net neutrality was introduced during the Obama administration in 2015. From what I understand it was the governments way of micro managing ISP's and other online services, to try and stop "paid prioritization". You can look up "paid prioritization" and maybe get a better understanding of it. As John mentioned, it is confusing! But I haven't noticed anything different in the past 3 years with "net neutrality" compared to all the years of the internet before hand. So hopefully no worries?!

What may well happen is that the smaller ISPs will find it harder to stay in business. As with most things that the Republicans appear to drive forward it benefits the "big" guys first. I think that the concern is that it is viewed as a step towards a stronger control of the internet and what it contains.

I have found a news article today about net neutrality and how it could arrive in France someday (or not) and impact the internet here too. Anyway, there was a short explanation of what it is:

In concrete terms, each provider in the United States will be able to define the bandwidth allocated according to the type of content or site visited. For the user, this could be reflected in higher bills, or simply by the banning or slowing down of certain sites and services that are not in partnership with their service provider.

It's the last part that I would like to hilight:

banning or slowing down certain sites and services that are not in partnership with their service provider.

From my point of view, it means that the biggest sites will have to give money to the web providers, if they want to continue to stay at their highest level and continue to attract people. Couldn't it work like that?

If yes, then I (again) see the last move of Vimeo as a way to go in this direction. I mean, if they have to pay web providers to be on top and remain competitive against Youtube and other streaming sites, they have to pay. Thus it is impacted on their clients, and they increase the price of the subscription price. Or reduce the quality of the free service. Which is what just happened.

"What may well happen is that the smaller ISPs will find it harder to stay in business...... I think that the concern is that it is viewed as a step towards a stronger control of the internet and what it contains."

For "Smaller ISPs" you can also include some "specialist sites" (e.g. Vimeo, YouTube, etc.) who are going to be pressed to pay more for the Bandwidth they want/need - hence the restrictions/limits on "free" subscriptions?

This is the beginning of a more "capitalist" future for the internet - as it will enforce profitability on the sites before access/quality. Hence the concerns about freedom of expression etc.

To me it (whilst probably being inevitable in the current economic/political climate) is very worrying. Every time something is developed (medicines, energy sources, media, etc. - internet) it almost inevitably ends up being controlled by economic and political interests, and for their own personal benefit/gain - not the benefit of the users/consumers, who end up paying for a sub-standard product at the end of the day.

Rant? Oh don't worry, I find that you sounded very calm and I am personally more angry than that at this idea of a "capitalist" internet, both for my personal use (because I can't afford to pay more) and for my creative activity (such limitations such as what I discoverd on Vimeo are not good for film makers). And there may be much more than that to discover in the future! What about my own domain, my website, etc?). I don't like a lot where the world is going.

Net neutrality is the last step in the order of projects that few people intend to implement for us. I'm talking about hundreds of powerful against billions of people. The important thing is to make us slaves and the trick is that we will ask ourselves. The old "battle of the have-nots" is still current.I do not like being serious but unfortunately I see that humanity has a bad future and can only blame itself.

1% now own the vast majority of the world's "assets". To be brutally honest, this has been developing over many years since the end of World War II, and has been allowed to happen by "Democracy", where less than or only 30% of the entitled actually vote, and those "Elected" artificially claim that they have a "mandate" as a result.